Beware, O wanderer. the road is walking too. – J.H.
From Jim Harrison:The Essential Poems (Copper Canyon, May 2019).
At nineteen I began to degenerate,
slight smell of death in my gestures,
unbelieving, tentative, wailing…
so nineteen years have gone. It doesn’t matter.
It might have taken fifty. Or never.
Now the barriers are dissolving, the stone fences
in shambles. I want to have my life
in cloud shapes, water shapes, wind shapes,
crow call, marsh hawk swooping over grass and weed tips.
Let the scavenger take what he finds.
Let the predator love his prey.
– “Returning to Earth,” 1977
“The Theory & Practice of Rivers”:
The days are stacked against
what we think we are:
after a month of interior weeping
it occurred to me that in times like these
I have nothing to fall back on
except the sun and moon and earth.
I dress in camouflage and crawl
around swamps and forest, seeing
the bitch coyote five times but never
before she sees me. Her look
is curious, almost a smile.
